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So it’s here, finally, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s much-hyped, glitzy, glossy, technology-heavy homage — masquerading as an intellectualized cultural-studies project — to David Bowie, the sylphlike, ageless British pop star whose ongoing self-reinventions have seen him duck and dodge the long, slow fade to irrelevance (hello, Rolling Stones) that inevitably befalls even the most potent figures in this youth-obsessed world.

The exhibition David Bowie Is aims high, ushering in a shopping list of influences, collaborators and moments meant to demonstrate Bowie’s highly attuned cultural antennae.

Admirable pains are taken by the curators of the Victoria and Albert Museum, from which the show has been borrowed, to site Bowie less as pop star and more as a cultural bellwether for an entire slate of postmodern anxieties, from the deadening grey of postwar England through to the technologically and transformative space race (“Ziggy Stardust,” his initial star turn in 1972, was nothing if not leavening of the optimism represented by the moon landing) to the burgeoning sexual revolution (Bowie presented himself as gay, straight, asexual and all of the above).

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More to the point, the show argues that Bowie, with his ever growing slate of alter-egos, was a groundbreaking self-curated construct, primed and ready for polarized society in the late 1960s in the midst of a social revolution. With his wild costumes and makeup, he could make himself both a lightning rod for criticism and an icon for non-conformity, all of which amounted to his proper goal: a surfeit of media coverage and an unstoppable, burgeoning fame.

David Bowie's original Ziggy Stardust costume, set inside a mirrored chamber where a video of the singer performing in the costume is playing. (Lucas Olyniuk / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

A view of the final room of David Bowie Is ..., where concert videos play on three sides with various costiumes are stationed around the room. I (Lucas Oleniuk / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

An earlier publicity photo of David Bowie, whose personae are now the topic of an exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario: David Bowie Is . . .

A video installation from the first room of David Bowie Is .., which chronicles the pop star's formative years as a performer in hardscrabble working class London.

And fair enough: Bowie is the professor emeritus of stagy self-promotion, studied closely, if not particularly well, by the likes of Madonna and Lady Gaga, not to mention future superstars yet to appear on the horizon, vamping in front of their bedroom mirror, as Bowie himself did 50 years ago.

But the central argument, that Bowie represents the origin of his particular species — a media-sensitized spectacle maker who used his tools of manipulation to manufacture a slippery, decentred fame — isn’t quite right. That he used it to sell records, still more the passport to mass appeal than the things he aped in art or theatre, just gave him the visibility, and the cash, to keep it going.

Warhol had been plying sensationalism and self-image, to potent effect, for more than a decade before Ziggy Stardust, Bowie’s first real performative persona, turned up. The British duo Gilbert and George had declared themselves an artwork some years before, as well, performing in public and filming themselves as famous, significant objects (a small room in the Bowie exhibition pays some homage to them both with objects from the AGO’s own collection).

The V and A has said it struggled against chronology, to avoid a predictable take on things, but it inevitably creeps in. The first room, filled with early ’60s memorabilia, is accompanied by an audio recording of Bowie’s voice saying such things as “Should I be me . . . or should I make up a bunch of people instead? When I was somebody else, it worked better.”

That’s the thread you’re meant to run through the show, which is expertly installed and impressively realized in the very best of contemporary exhibiting techniques (the video installations and multimedia are enthralling all by themselves).

And it’s a worthy thread to follow but one that gets lost in the avalanche of materials and distractions to be found here (I’m not sure anyone really needed to see a clip from 1986’s Labyrinth, did they?)

The other side of it, though, starts to run inevitably into idolatry, elevating Bowie as a cultural soothsayer and zeitgeist-defining icon who was always one step ahead. There’s no question Bowie, with his edgy portrayals of sex and drug cultures and ever-morphing public image, bridged gaps between mainstream and underground cultures; but the sense one gets, of a one-man cultural revolution that gathered up in his arms every subversive activity of the 20th century and became its high priest, seems a little much.

The show is, in moments, astonishingly great fun — anyone with the slightest interest in Bowie’s diehard theatricality and experimentalism can’t help but get an electric charge from his 1979 Saturday Night Live performance of “The Man Who Sold the World,” in outsize black-and-white Tweedledee tuxedo costume alongside Klaus Nomi, the out-there German singer and queer-culture icon who made part of his living acting like a live mannequin in store windows in New York — and at others a bottomless, obsessive fan-boy bore.

Costumes perched on tiny mannequins — Bowie has a 26-inch waist — reduce the show’s high-minded agenda at times to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame literality. In the final room, on the fifth floor, you arrive at a veritable cathedral to the central character here — who is really several characters, of course — and a video montage of a slate of them performing surrounds you on three sides.

A greatest hits collection — “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” “Rebel Rebel” — booms all around you and the entire scene takes on the strange sense of an American Express commercial. I kept expecting a promo for “front of the line” to appear.

Wandering out, I had to ask myself whether the show had somehow imparted on me a deeper and fuller understanding of the cultural upheavals of the past 50 years, as it had intended, or whether it had mostly offered a greater and fuller understanding of David Bowie. I had to admit that it’s the latter. And if that’s enough for you, who am I to judge?

David Bowie Is runs Sept. 25 to Nov. 27 at the http://www.ago.net/ Art Gallery of OntarioEND, ago.net.

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